Racing cars being assembled at the Island Grounds in Chennai.
| Photo Credit: B. Jothi Ramalingam
With less than 48 hours to go before racing cars vroom around the streets of Chennai during the second round of the Indian Racing Festival, the mechanics and engineers were busy working on the cars in the temporary paddock at the Island Grounds on Thursday (August 29, 2024).
The 3.5-km Chennai Formula Racing Circuit, with 19 corners, goes around the Island Grounds with the start-finish straight on the beach road. However, most of the track consists of long straights interconnected with chicanes, and the layout lends itself to cars going flat out on the straights, reaching very high speeds that should thrill the audiences.
Lap times are expected to be quick, with the average expected to be around 90 seconds for F4, and the IRL laps could be faster by a couple of seconds.
The F4 championship uses a Mygale F4 Gen 2 car powered by an Alpine 1.3-litre turbocharged engine prepared by Oreca. These open-wheel and open-cockpit cars can reach a top speed of 210 kmph on the straights.
The IRL, meanwhile, uses Wolf Racing Cars (Wolf Thunder GB08) with an Aprilia RSV4 1.0 engine that can reach a top speed of 240 kmph. Unlike the F4 cars, the IRL cars are closed-wheels.
While the long straights allow the drivers to take the cars to the limit, at the same time, even a tiny mistake can prove costly since street courses don’t have a lot of run-off areas. The drivers need to be cognizant of the barriers, and the challenge will be how they thread the needle between finding the limit without going over it, even by a millimetre.
